


Nightingale

by RiverValeria



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Acts of Kindness, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2019-12-27 03:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18295814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiverValeria/pseuds/RiverValeria
Summary: Takes place just after season 2 of the Netflix series. Some spoilers - you've been warned!Haunted by his father's death, surrounded by the ghosts of his childhood, Alucard struggles to face a bleak, solitary life as an orphan and a murderer. For weeks after the departure of Sypha Belnades and Trevor Belmont, no one intruded on his melancholy; even vagrants and thieves shunned the black castle and the battlefield stench of old blood that emanated from it. When eventually someone dares to cross the threshold, he does not bother himself to expel her, his volition numbed by crippling regrets. But although she soon leaves of her own accord, she returns, and returns again, to interrupt his misery and rouse his curiosity.





	1. The Woman in Blue

She had returned.

The woman in the blue dress stood in the entryway, a single step over the blasted, splintered threshold. The morning sun flooded in behind her, so that even Alucard’s eyes could not make out her features with any precision. She did not move with the wary, purposeful grace of a hunter, nor did any aura of magic emanate from her. So far as Alucard could determine, from his perch in the shadows of the narthex’s vaulted ceiling, she seemed a thoroughly ordinary human being.

Excepting only that she was unafraid.

Of the few locals who had proven brave enough to chance a look at the massive black castle, only three others had dared step inside – all three barely pubescent boys, who had been goaded into their folly, dared by their peers. They, along with all the others who had been less brave and kept their distance, had reeked of adrenaline, of fear. This woman had not – and now, she had come back.

She surveyed the ruined hall, apparently undisturbed by the ominous stains on the stone floors, the rents in the wooden paneling, and the incongruous scorch marks and water damage. Hands on her hips, she nodded slightly to herself, as if coming to a decision. Kneeling in a relatively debris-free square of grey stone, she rummaged for a moment in the rucksack she had carried in with her and withdrew a small bundle, wrapped in a length of simple, homespun cloth. Rising again, she ventured further into the entry, mounting the derelict staircase with one hand holding the bundle, and one keeping the hem of her dress – which was worn, though carefully mended – from the dusty steps. She laid the bundle at the top of the stair and retreated, without haste, the way she had come. Stooping briefly to gather her rucksack, she cast one curious glance back into the hall. Then she was gone.

Staring at the whorls in the wooden vault of his makeshift bed in the narthex rafters, Alucard wondered whether she would come again. Then he wondered at his curiosity, because it had been weeks since he had troubled himself to wonder at anything at all. He closed his eyes and thought no more.

But she did return, the next day, and the day after that. She did not linger, and she did not speak, and she never ventured past the door. The ruins of the great entry hall were surveyed on both occasions with a slow, speculative gaze, and then she left.

On the third day, it finally occurred to him to investigate the bundle that she had left at the top of the stairs.

Movement proved difficult. Muscle and tendon protested, stiffly rigid, if not precisely sore. His limbs seemed made of newly cut lumber instead of flesh, yielding only to great force. He had lain in his half-reclining pose in the narthex rafters for some time, though he could not recollect precisely how long. A week, at least. Since before the woman in blue had come the first time.

He dropped to the landing, stumbling a bit in his stiffness, and bent over the package she had left behind. His fingers fumbled at the string securing the cloth around the lightweight contents, but he managed to untie it.

Inside, he found a loaf of bread, hardened now, though it had probably been fresh when she left it. A small, earthenware dish of muscadine grapes had survived in somewhat better condition. A block of cheese lay wrapped in a separate length of cloth.

Alucard blinked at the food, surprised, as much by the sensation of surprise as by the offering itself. She had known she wasn’t alone in Dracula’s abandoned castle. She hadn’t seen him, he knew that. He didn’t think she had even realized he was in the same room. Still, she obviously knew someone lived in the ruins.

If one could term such slow ossification living.

He lifted the block of cheese, suddenly conscious that he had not eaten in recent memory. That was, perhaps, why he felt so odd, he reasoned dimly.

The hard, yellow cheese had turned brittle at the edges, but remained edible, nonetheless. The muscadines were soft with age, but still sweet. And although the bread was unpleasantly tough, there was no mold on it, so he ate that, too. The crumbs and the crumpled homespun he left where he had discarded them, with the rest of the rubbish, when he resumed his place in the rafters.

The fourth day dawned with the briskness of early autumn, and again the woman in blue stepped just inside the narthex, oblivious of the silent man in the ceiling. Apprehending that the bundle had been opened and its contents were vanished, she retrieved the string and the bits of cloth he had left lying there, and, leaving a new bundle in their place, she descended the stair and disappeared.

Inside this second bundle, he found flatbread, part of a roasted bird, two apples, and a small jar of beer.

Alucard ate it all and went back to the ceiling. It was safer, here in the narthex, where little of importance had ever happened, only comings and goings. Unlike the kitchen, where his mother had kneaded bread and shaped cookies and carved birds. Unlike the study where his father had tutored him in rhetoric and languages and classical philosophy. Unlike their laboratories, where they had pursued the knowledge for which they had shared such passion.

Unlike his childhood bedroom, where Vlad Tepes had died.

No. Where Vlad Tepes had been killed.

He closed his eyes and curled into the wood, forcing the thought away. He avoided sleep, most of the time; his dreams were haunted, stalked by terrors he could not recall upon waking. Occasionally, though, his conscious memories grew so painful that the torment of fear grew attractive by comparison. For all his ridiculing Trevor Belmont’s drunkenness, he would have gladly sought oblivion at the bottom of a bottle, had he hope of finding it. He didn’t; alcohol hadn’t the slightest effect on his unique metabolism, but the girl’s homebrewed beer warmed his belly, and he fell into a fitful slumber that lasted until the following morning, when again, the woman in blue arrived with the dawn.

Upon discovering the second meal taken, she left another. And upon the next morning, another. And then she began to come twice daily, once at dawn, and once at twilight. This continued so for a fortnight or better; he wasn’t entirely sure of the passage of time, anymore. The girl never asked for him, never advanced further into the castle than the great entryway stair, but she came. Having indulged his hunger the once, it would not be denied again, so Alucard roused himself long enough to take what she left him.

Then, one morning, she did not come immediately up the stairs and down again. Instead, she deposited a crude broom and several buckets full of water beside the massive, broken door. Slipping quietly back outside, she returned a few minutes later with her arms full of rags and scrub brushes, stinking of harsh lye soap. She had left off the blue dress by which he identified her; the drab grey gown she wore instead was nearly in tatters, though its worn softness molded attractively to the slim, narrow-shouldered body. Leaving her domiciliary tools at the entryway, she tied a heavy smock over the ragged dress, twisted up her hair in a leather thong, and, bizarrely, began to clear the debris from the entrance hall.

Alucard shifted a bit in his loft, to see her better, vaguely curious, but disinclined toward conversation. She might not fear what she could not see, but a man falling from the narthex’s towering ceiling would likely frighten her away. And he felt disinclined toward that, as well. She was novel, at least. A syncopated beat in the grim, monotonous ticking that had become his existence.

Hours passed as she collected all the rubble that could be carried away: spars of fragmented wood, broken stone from the floor, shards of glass. Anything she could lift or drag went outside. She paused to rest from time to time, to mop her sweaty face, to rub a shoulder with a grimace of discomfort, or to drink from a ladle in the tin pail, but she did not stop. And when only the wreckage she could not carry remained behind, she took her rough broom and attacked the dust.

Early in the afternoon, she came again to the top of the staircase, moving slowly, wearily. Dirt and sweat had smeared together on every visible bit of flesh, leaving a thin caking of mud behind. Her hair, thick and dark, appeared dull and grey under a film of fine dust. She left two bundles of food, two meals, and then she went out into the sunlight.

She scoured the stone floors on hands and knees the next day.

What a strange creature, he mused, observing from the rafters. Small, and, judging by her efforts the day prior, not especially strong, she had not been accustomed to hard labor, nor yet cleaning. She seemed to know what she was doing well enough, but the unfamiliar work quickly blistered her hands. Still she kept doggedly at the chore, scrubbing her brushes and lye soap relentlessly over the blood stains. A dilution of sodium chloride would serve her better, but he felt no compulsion to prepare one. She would go, soon enough. Even the ones he found relatively tolerable left eventually.

Even so, he watched her, for the sake of distraction. She was a pretty girl of twenty, or nearly, with large, dark eyes, thickly rimmed with black lashes. Her waist-length, ruler-straight hair seemed somewhat lighter. She had worn it in a thick braid down her back the first few times he had seen her. Today she had it twisted up, so as not to drag it on the blood-soaked floor over which she bent so industriously.

By noon, she had scrubbed half the floor of the narthex. The worst of the stains resisted her, but even these had faded, and the gory stench of old blood had dissipated. It seemed to Alucard rather a tremendous amount of effort for very little reward, but she smiled in weary satisfaction before she climbed the stairs, to leave him a meat pie and some more apples for his dinner, and flatbread with cheese for his breakfast. Then she was gone again.

For a time, Alucard had worried that the castle might prove tempting shelter for the odd vagabond, and that he would be forced to evict the unwary traveler desperate enough to seek its dubious shelter. In the time since Belmont and Sypha had left him, no one had found ever themselves in such dire straits as to risk approaching the menacing black structure. It occurred to him now that the girl might be cleaning the castle narthex for her own use, but he dismissed the thought. Why leave every evening, if she meant to attempt making a home here?

She cleaned the rest of the narthex, including the badly damaged stair and the upper landing, scrubbing away the remnants of Dracula’s penultimate battle. Nothing within reach was safe from her soap and brushes, and she startled him one morning, by dragging in a massive ladder, procured from god-knew-where, in an attempt to clean the upper walls. She stopped at the top of the ladder, though Alucard suspected darkly she would have used a hoist and ropes to clean the rafters in which he had concealed himself, had she the means to erect a pulley with a counterweight.

Every day, whether she stayed to clean or not, there were two fresh meals left for him at the top of the stair. Simple fare, and not a great deal of it, but provided faithfully. Most days, the descent to the floor and the return to the ceiling were all the movement he accomplished. Most days, he wished he had sense enough to stay there, congealing inside his own skin, petrifying like the living fossil he knew himself to be. But if the woman in blue and her cleaning crusade had distracted his other senses, her food interrupted the sourness of his own unwashed mouth and foul breath and eased the ache in his stomach. A small part of him welcomed the brief change. A small, but apparently irresistible part. His humanity, perhaps. Or possibly it was nothing more than a base survival instinct.

Alucard wished it gone, whatever it was. He had been fading, until she arrived to stir his thoughts and senses. If not for that unconquerable urge to… not to  _live_ , perhaps, but to exist as something distinct from the stillness and silence surrounding him, if not for that, he might have summoned the wherewithal to make her go. As it was, he could not rouse himself even to address her. Only to watch, as the front rooms of his father’s castle were slowly put to rights and the autumn nights turned colder.

It was one of those mornings, when he knew she would not stay. The air was chill, and she came, dressed in blue, forgoing her ragged cleaning clothes. In all these weeks, she had never spoken, never left a message, never attempted to communicate with him in any way. She did not today, only hurried up the stair with a covered dish and left again. But something shifted in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and Alucard found himself bereft and suddenly anxious about where she went when she was not with him.

Which was utter foolishness. She had never been with him, as she had never known herself to be in his presence at all.

But for better or worse – the latter, most of the time – he was his parents’ son. The curiosity would not die, no matter how he reasoned with himself, and he could no longer rely upon the apathy with which he had shielded himself for so many long and weary weeks. So, as her slim form faded into the misty morning, he eased himself out of the narthex vault and went in search of a scrying mirror. His father had possessed several, the most complex of which had been destroyed when Sypha summoned the castle through Belmont’s own scrying mirror. But there had been two others, and he was relieved to find one of them in a wing of the castle where he had few memories, where the ghosts did not shriek quite so loudly.

He carried it back to one of the ground-level rooms which she had yet to enter, and spent several minutes focusing its reflection on the castle’s entry. Sans blood or name, he had no way to fix it to her, except to follow her geographical position. When she left the following day, having spent the morning straightening a small antechamber west of the narthex, Alucard retreated to the mirror and followed her away.

She had thrown a shawl over her shoulders, but even from the distance he kept, Alucard could see her shiver as she hurried away from the castle. It was a cool autumn evening, grey with a promise of rain and full of hay and molding leaves. He had stayed within the dusty narthex for so long that the fragrances of harvest-time likely would have choked him; as it was, even the grey light of the overcast sky stabbed his eyes, after being so long in the darkness.

She passed the wind-blasted, fallen trees and came to the wild, overgrown fields that had once supplied the Belmonts the wheat for their bread and the barley for their beer. They were untended, but the perennial autumn wheat struggled gamely on, not more than waist-high and sickly-looking. She took up a rusty scythe with which to cut it and worked for perhaps twos hours at gathering the wheat, before taking it to the threshing floor. Another several hours of labor won her threshed and winnowed grain, which she would still have to mill, somehow. She’d taken more than she needed; she must be storing the extra for the coming winter.

It had not once occurred to him that she must be living nearby, to arrive in the castle every morning at dawn. It was a desolate region; the Belmont’s property had been vast, and the nearest town was ten miles off. It had not occurred to him to wonder how a woman of apparently small means could acquire flour and salt and meat enough to feed not only herself, but the unseen spectre she knew to be in the castle. It had not occurred to him to wonder why in coldest hell she bothered with the damned place to begin with.

He felt very stupid. And very much afraid. Indulging the one question of her whereabouts seemed to have opened a floodgate to other queries. And if he could not quash his curiosity, he must face the madness of life alone in Dracula’s castle, an orphan and a murderer.

Yet he followed her.

She walk a trap line, which produced two squirrels. These were skinned and gutted on the spot. A fishing line was relieved its three trout and a carp. By the time she had finished the business of procuring food, twilight had descended on the ruins of the Belmont estate, and she carried herself and her haul inside the dubious protection of its crumbling outer wall. Depositing her burdens near the shattered gate, she returned three times to a surprisingly well-preserved well, filling heavy wooden buckets and hoisting them over her shoulders to transport them back to the house. One she used to water a small, fenced-in vegetable garden – fenced in, he saw, to protect it from a trio of goats which wandered nearby. They nosed at her companionably, but although she gently patted each, she had nothing to say to them.

She could not have been here when Sypha landed the castle on the Belmont library. The blast would have killed her, destroyed the garden and the goats. This little croft had been established in startlingly short order, in those hours she had not devoted to the castle. And at a cost; the ragged dress that had once clung to her now hung from a much thinner frame.

The girl had not taken any troubles to clean Trevor Belmont’s hollowed-out shell of a house, Alucard saw, with a vague sense of satisfaction. This gratification was soon supplanted by the disgruntling realization that she might have more easily made her home in the castle but had chosen the abandoned house instead. His childhood home might be battle-scarred and badly damaged, but even so, it was in far better repair than Belmont’s. He felt conscious of an absurd but decided resentment.

When she had disappeared beneath the eaves of the east wing, Alucard closed the distance he had kept, magnifying his view so that he could follow her through the broken halls, until she sank down upon the floor in what must have once been a servants’ kitchen. She breathed slowly and heavily, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head resting on them. After several long minutes, she straightened, lying back against a wall, eyes closed, tightened with pain or discomfort.

Alucard wondered uneasily whether she knew he had been watching her from the rafters, after all. Never in the weeks since she had first come with her bread and muscadines had he seen her so thoroughly exhausted, and yet, the mere existence of the little wilderness farm was proof of her efforts outside the castle, beyond his notice. Exhaling sharply, she pushed herself onto her feet once more, and then she disappeared through a shadowed doorway, carrying with her one of the buckets of water and a white woolen shift. Realizing that she meant to bathe, Alucard took a moment to examine the room she had reclaimed from the ravages of time and abandonment.

Unlike the rest of the tumbled down house, she had bothered to tidy this room and to keep it tidy. A bedstead had been dragged in from somewhere, and the moth-eaten mattress stuffed with fresh hay. The blankets piled upon it were tatty, but clean and plentiful. While the estate must have been plundered a hundred times over, some of the homelier articles remained, old and damaged, but serviceable. She had rounded up cooking pots and utensils, dishes and bedding and all the other paraphernalia human beings seemed to collect.

He frowned at the cold hearth, wondering why she had not built a fire, when she had been plainly chilled through, and would be more so after bathing. It must be functional; there were recent ashes in it and logs stacked beside it, and a black pot hung on the hob. With an odd sort of wrench, he noticed the awkwardly cut firewood; she must have hewn the timber herself, from the fallen trees surrounding them. She couldn’t waste the effort for mere comfort’s sake; the firewood would be used only to cook, so long as the cold might be endured.

He averted his gaze when the splashing ceased, glancing up briefly to see that she was decent. She worked in her shift, which covered her modestly enough, at first. When she built the fire, however, and put water in the pot to boil, the light passed through the thin weave, making it startling clear that she wore nothing beneath it. Alucard was no choirboy, but his mother had impressed _some_ sense of decorum on him. The unintentional voyeurism sat ill. He tried not to stare, but the shadowy motion of her legs beneath her shift and the soft brush of her nipples against the fine cloth were difficult to ignore.

He distracted himself by calling to mind the sounds and smells of her activities, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the smoky, comfortable warmth that would slowly suffuse the room. He smelled fish and salt and vinegar as she deposited her catch into a brining barrel, and packed vegetables in pickling jars. He heard plainly the wet, squelching sound of tearing flesh, as she deboned the squirrels and chopped the meat before dropping it into the pot to boil along with the remaining vegetables. Roasting the rodents on skewers would have been faster and much less work, but he supposed she wanted what little fat might be got from them.

Only that morning, a half-day’s work at the castle had seemed to him a great deal of effort. He had not considered that keeping herself fed, clothed, and housed also required daily toil. Never in his life had he worked so hard – fought, yes, certainly. The exertion required merely to exist, to avoid starving or freezing to death, staggered him. She lived hand to mouth, scraping a living from the land with little more than her wits and sweat. Perhaps it would have been a bit easier for a woman married – but then, there likely would have been children to feed, as well.

As she was currently feeding the sorry, foolish dhampir upon whom, for some unknown reason, she’d taken pity.

She left him squirrel stew the next day, in their usual spot at the top of the entry stair. He’d seen the little animals and knew perfectly well she had given him every bit of meat she’d scraped from their bones.

Shame proved more difficult to quell than curiosity.

The next morning, she stood just outside the castle, her round, small mouth pursed thoughtfully. Observing from behind the remnants of the destroyed castle door, Alucard realized he had never seen his self-appointed cook and housekeeper so closely, or in direct sunlight. He’d had a fair sense of the shape of her, the heart-shaped face and Greek nose, the subtly arched brows and delicate jaw, but her color had always been muted by the castle’s obscuring shadows and neither the damp grey light of yesterday’s afternoon nor the wavering firelight of her makeshift home had done much to improve his understanding of it.

In the chilly, but cheerfully bright morning, her coloring proved richly autumnal, the ivory skin, unmarked by age or illness, lightly tanned from her outdoor exertions. Her thickly plaited hair was not quite so dark as he had thought, but shone a polished walnut brown, highlighted here and there with gleaming ribbons of dark gold. The large eyes were not brown at all, but a remarkably dark hazel that called to mind a gemstone he had once seen, a dark brown opal liberally flecked with bright amber and startling greens. These flashed with intelligence and amusement as she surveyed the empty space where she had piled all the rubble that she had brought out from the castle.

Unable to rest with her stew sitting so heavily in his stomach, Alucard had taken it away in the night. He had also dealt with the larger pieces of wreckage inside the castle that she hadn’t been able to move, as she discovered when she finally advanced inside. As best he could judge, from the small furrow in her brow and the half-smile on her mouth, his gesture was appreciated. Satisfaction, a painfully warm sensation, scorched him within as she retrieved her things to sweep and scour the dirt remaining in the wake of the large debris. He left her to her work, slipping out from a broken window a floor above her.

When she returned to the Belmont estate, she was again surprised, by a pair of satchels hanging on the gate. In one, she found a large, skinned hare. Alucard had delivered its hide separately, in the other bag. He hadn’t known how to cure the skin, but he _had_ dipped it in a chemical solution decocted in one of the castle’s several laboratories, one which ought to have killed the vermin that invested the soft fur, a toxic solution best kept well away from the meat. His education may have tended toward more esoteric matters than farming or animal husbandry, but killing, of hares or pests or anything else – he was quite familiar with killing.

He was much gratified to find that the next day’s hare pie tasted far better than the previous day’s stew.

As autumn wore on and winter approached, Alucard and the girl, whom he still considered the woman in blue, even though she wore the blue dress but rarely, settled into a comfortable routine. Their paths never crossed; he never approached her, nor did she make any overtures at communicating with him. But the silent, unacknowledged companionship gradually dispelled the rigor mortis – rigor vitae? – that had slowed his heart and mind and stiffened his body, and if he was sad, it was no more than the sadness Sypha had noted months ago. He was alive, at least, and meant to remain so.

The small woman kept at her tasks, moving slowly but surely through the ground level of the castle. Not all the rooms were badly damaged, but most were in some state of disarray from Sypha’s struggle with the engines. So, Alucard followed along behind her, unseen, and when she had left for the day, he righted fallen, unwieldy furniture and cleared the heavier rubble, so that she was not obliged to drag broken stone and splintered wood from one end of the castle to the other. He should have done more, perhaps, but the pall of grief still clung to the uninhabited rooms, and consciously or unconsciously, he shunned them, only leaving the narthex when obliged by a particular need. The rooms seemed less woefully empty, however, after the woman in blue had entered them. She banished the dust and debris and the devastation, leaving behind her the harsh odor of lye and the pleasanter fragrance of hay and wood smoke, an exorcising incense more powerful than any carried in a church’s censer.

For his part, after that first excursion, Alucard went out frequently to hunt. Game was plentiful in this lonely bit of countryside, so much so that he had to consciously remind himself not to kill the boar and stag that roamed freely in the ravaged forest and fallow fields. Instead, loathe to create more work for his nameless companion, he hunted bird and small animals that could be eaten quickly and wouldn’t need to be preserved by smoking or salting the meat. He left the kill bagged on the gate and dressed most of it, though he hated plucking feathers and left the birds for her, assuaging his conscience by telling himself she would want the down for pillows or bedding. As recompense for this undeniable bit of laziness on his part, he left her the eggs of any doves or pigeons whose nests he happened upon. The birds bred year-round, and they had quickly reestablished themselves in the fallen trees.

Unable to resist, he occasionally watched the girl through the mirror as she went about her work. Although his hunting supplemented her food stores and left her with a bit more time, she had a powerful abhorrence of idleness. She spent her extra hours profitably, searched the downed forest for edible nuts and fungi and wild onions, churning butter from goat milk, and rendering smelly but effective soaps and candles from animal fat. The latter she left as small gifts alongside the food. His night vision was quite good, and he left the candles, but he put to soap to good use. Roused at last from the stupor into which he been sunk, he had taken up basic hygiene again, shaving the execrably scraggly beard that chafed his chin and bathing in the shallows of the nearby River Olt, but his clothes stank nearly as badly as the hides he left her.

As he’d hoped, she had proven more knowledgeable than he regarding the preservation of skins. Tanning, he learned, was a fascinating and thoroughly disgusting procedure. First, she had stretched the pelts on makeshift racks in the garden, safe from the infinite gullets of her three goats, and carefully scraped away any traces of flesh he had left clinging to the skin. Then she boiled the animals’ brains and mashed them, spreading this mixture on the cleaned hides, in two or more applications over several days. Once dry, she worked the hides with her hands, over and over again, stretching them, softening them until they were supple. Finally, she smoked the preserved skins over an outdoor fire. The pelts were small, and most of them fine-furred creatures that wouldn’t provide a great deal of warmth, but she had managed a rough pair of warm boots from squirrel and marmot hides. She was no more than a novice cobbler, and the awkwardly constructed boots made Alucard smile despite himself when he saw them.

Whatever her other talents, she was a fair hand in the kitchen and a well-practiced butcher, so much so that Alucard began to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to take down some of the bigger game after all. Smoked meat and jerky might make her life a little easier, after the initial work was finished, although he had some vague notion of salt being required. She already used a great deal of that brining fish. Some of these she smoked over a hot flame for quick consumption, but many were smoked for hours and hours above a smaller, cooler fire, and dehydrated for longer storage. It all tasted quite well; clearly she knew how to cold smoke meat, given the proper tools. The simple construction she used for the lightweight fish wouldn’t bear up under venison flanks or hog hams, though, and he’d seen nothing larger that would serve. Besides, unlike flour and milk, salt must be purchased, and she would not be readily able to obtain more.

One afternoon, while he was watching her through the mirror, he saw her suddenly jump up from the tree under which she had been foraging. There was a huge smile on her face, and her apron was overflowing with a trove of burgundy truffles. When Alucard discovered how well she could cook them, he went foraging himself, and left a sack full of them on her doorstep. He had a taste for truffles and chanterelles – an inheritance from his mother; his father had found the idea of eating fungi entirely detestable.

This small munificence was so well-rewarded with roasted mushrooms, fowl in mushroom sauce, and buttery mushroom dumplings that, after a few days' hesitation, he made a foray into the kitchen that he had avoided for so long. Curious as to what other culinary resources he might have to augment her limited pantry, he inspected cabinets and storage bins which had not been touched for several years – although he discovered with distaste that the wine cellar had been thoroughly savaged during his father’s campaign, and there was no ale nor any hard spirits to be found anywhere. He did uncover a case of Moorish sherry, as well as some salt, several jars of honey, and not a few dried herbs.

To his relief, he found no ghosts. The memories fluttered through his mind like a cool wind, bittersweet, but not staggeringly painful. Even so, he hesitated to take more than the consumables, though there were plenty of jars and pots the woman in blue might make use of. Deciding not to question it and risk raising the ghosts he had so far avoided, he left his mother’s cookware undisturbed.

When he left his offerings at the gate along with a pair of fat woodcocks, he lingered for a moment, considering the neat furrows of the girl’s garden. There was little left to harvest; the first hard frost would be soon, he could feel it in the chill of the air. Some years prior, his father had told him and his mother about buildings in the Far East which had been heated below the floor and were used to grow flowers and vegetables year-round, regardless of the outside temperature. If he could contrive some way in which to heat a room, without blocking out the sunlight, perhaps she needn’t risk the loose teeth and anemia his mother had treated continually during the winter months, when the peasantry had little access to fresh greens or vegetables. His father had engineered a moving castle; surely Alucard could devise a structure in which to grow cabbages in the dead of winter.

It was, he found with some surprise, a very pleasant idea to turn over in his mind. For so very long, his problems had been those of survival, both his own and that of humanity at large. This little puzzle was charmingly innocuous by comparison, and it was a relief to apply his not-inconsiderable intelligence to something less urgent than imminent death and potential genocide.

The next evening, comfortably full of the woodcock, which had been simmered to tender perfection in a rich sherry-and-truffle roux, with a book of de Pisan’s poetry in hand and a rough concept for a hothouse sketched out in his mind, Alucard thought perhaps this new life was not so very disagreeable, after all.

It was a week or two later that he finally decided to follow her outside the castle, rather than merely spying on her through the scrying mirror.  Although several hours remained before sundown, it was snowing heavily and already darkening, and he was taken by the realization that the drifting snow was excellent camouflage for a white wolf. It would be an easy thing to conceal himself from her, to remain out of sight and at a distance. Firewood having become more of a necessity than a creature comfort, she went to the edge of the nearest thicket of dead trees, blown down by the arrival of the castle. As he approached, she stumbled as she brought the axe down and nearly struck herself it. Horrified, he made to leap at her, but he held back, realizing at the last moment that she wouldn’t – quite – amputate her foot with it. He stayed nearby, just in case, flinching with every echo of the falling axe.

Alarmed by her amateurish handling of the tool, he pointedly stacked a massive pile of firewood for her at the Belmont gate that night, after she had gone to bed. He also removed the axe and left in its place a small hatchet, sizeable enough to cut kindling but not much more. When she came to the castle the next morning, she glanced around the narthex with an amused smile, apparently unoffended by his tacit remarks on her axe-wielding skills.

He shadowed her frequently after that, aided by the occasional snow that swept down from the late autumn sky. The wheat had died, and, relieved of the laborious chores of producing flour and gathering fuel, the girl turned largely inward. She still checked her traps and fishing lines, and she coaxed a final harvest from her little vegetable garden, but a great deal of her time was spent combing through the Belmont ruins. For days, she seemed frustrated in her search; not knowing what she wanted, Alucard was unable to assist.

His ignorance vexed him, because her searches took her into less stable wings of the moldy old manor, small, dark, dangerous places where he could not easily follow her without being seen. If they were not friends, still, she was company of a sort, and he was honest enough with himself to admit that he had come to appreciate her silent, unintrusive companionship, preferring it to solitude – or, frankly, to actual companions, who chattered and prodded and asked painful questions. When, finally, he saw her emerge from a broken-down corridor with a moue of disappointment and a several skeins of ruined yarn, he was relieved to finally understand what she must be after, and a little ashamed not to have thought of it himself.

Even the blue dress was badly worn, now he bothered to look. Odd, how little her clothing impacted his perception. Had he met anyone else in the dingy, tattered gown she wore when scrubbing the castle floors, he would have likely dismissed her as a poor, ignorant, unlettered peasant. If he had taken any notice of such a woman at all, he hoped it would be with pity and not with scorn, but he knew himself and his follies too well to be certain. But the woman in blue was resourceful, strong-willed, and obviously intelligent, to have survived out here alone for so long as she had, and for those reasons, he did not believe she could have been a peasant. Poor, perhaps, but possessed of no small degree of refinement. Gently raised, then – but he did not believe she hailed from the aristocracy, either. She was too independently minded, too removed from the proprieties that held dominion over the upper classes, and entirely too self-sufficient for a noblewoman.

But farmer, merchant’s daughter, or gentlewoman, she must have clothes if she was to survive the cold.

He spent several hours of that evening searching the rooms where Dracula’s generals had recently lodged, with all their entourage and trappings, but none of their clothing would do; it was bloodstained and none of it appropriate to her needs. Their shoes, also, were unsuitable, neither small enough for her feet nor practical for hard use. He did uncover three bolts of delicately embroidered silk in one room, which was probably as useful to a single woman in the wilderness as a brick of gold to a man dying of thirst in the desert, but he took them anyway. The small mountain of furs he found stashed in another chamber were likely more useful, and he took those, too.

He also found several lengths of undyed linen in his mother’s sewing room. Unlike the kitchen, the sewing room held few memories, bittersweet or otherwise, for she had been seldom in it. She had been “a doctor, not a seamstress,” as she had often reminded him when exasperated with his lost buttons and ripped seams.

Unfortunately, although his mother’s unused supplies yielded several skeins of woolen thread, he found no woven cloth, aside from the linen. He could contrive a loom, possibly, but again, the idea of giving the girl more work to do displeased him. His father’s clothing was as ill-suited to the petite woman in the Belmont estate as that of any of his generals, and Alucard had no desire to rummage about in Dracula’s personal things, in any case.

Which left him either his mother’s wardrobe to pilfer or his own. Outer garments might be contrived from the furs, the linen would do for undergarments and shirts, but woolen cloth was essential in a Wallachian winter, and she clearly had none.

Upon reflection Alucard discovered, with no small degree of self-contempt, that he felt the same anxiety regarding his mother’s clothes as he had regarding her cooking utensils. He had not been in her bedroom since her death, and decided he preferred to let those memories lie. Her mementos would remain in her bedroom up the spiral stair, undisturbed, beneath the constellations his parents had painted on the ceiling.

He had not been in his own childhood room since his father’s death, and he was not keen to enter it now. Why the guilt imposed by his father’s ghost should be preferable to the regret of his mother’s was a question he didn’t care to ponder. It had something to do with punishment, or perhaps penance. In either case, he stood at the bottom of the spiral staircase for a long while, staring at the blasted walls and tumbled rocks. This wing had been home – her sewing room, her bedroom, his bedroom, their kitchen and dining room, the great library and his father’s study, tucked into the back of it. Their laboratories. His own study, when he’d been a little older, and had begun to indulge a voracious appetite for books.

His old clothes were in a trunk in his childhood bedroom: the foppish, pretty doublet and hose his mother had liked, as well as the more practical clothes he had worn to spar and fence with his father. Those soft leather breeches and simple, fitted woolen jackets would likely fit the girl; she was no bigger than he had been in his early adolescence. But an entire wall was missing from that room, and a great black stain had soaked into the Turkish rug.

She had not asked for help; in fact, she clearly intended to be entirely self-sufficient. Before he could carry that line of thought further, proving himself a coward by rationalizing his way out the decision he had made, he inhaled deeply and ducked into his old bedroom. He refused to look at the bloodstains on the floor, and he held his breath, so as not to have to smell his father’s blood. Seizing his trunk, he carried it swiftly from the room until he could no longer see the damage he and his father had inflicted on their home during their last, terrible battle.

He descended as quickly as possible to his sanctuary in the narthex, to look over the fruit of his efforts. The garments were from his youth and much too small for him now. The girl was petite, though; hopefully she wouldn’t have to alter them much.

He left the clothes and the yarn, the furs and the linen by the servants’ kitchen while she slept. Loath to return to the castle and his memories, he stayed out until after dawn, hunting and cutting timber. The howling of wolves echoed ominously over the blasted landscape, and he resolved to put a more solid fence between them and the girl sleeping in the Belmont estate. As the sun rose over the black castle, he decided grimly that it was probably long past time he start repairing the castle as well, though God knew that would be the work of lifetimes. He could at least board up the broken windows and fashion a rough front door to replace the one Carmilla’s troops had rammed.

The woman in blue had come and gone by the time he came back to the castle; apparently, she did not mean to clean today. Still, in addition to the meals he had come to expect, he found at the top of the narthex stairs an earthenware jug of blackberry wine and a walnut pastry, still steaming in the cold morning air. The latter was positively decadent by her standards, requiring use of her sparse reserves of honey. He assumed it meant she was pleased with his unorthodox gifts. She left, too, her scent in the air, a protective incense of smoke and hay and female musk. Alucard dragged a deep breath of it into his lungs and leapt into the narthex rafters to try to sleep, taking the jug of wine as a talisman to ward off bad dreams.


	2. Kindnesses

Alucard’s mother, called out of her bed to serve as midwife for the umpteenth time in a month, had once observed sourly that babies had a talent for choosing the most inconvenient times to make their debuts. The aptitude seemed not to be limited to human infants, for after a week of beautiful weather, the night the two kids were born was foul and stormy, not quite cold enough to freeze and not nearly warm enough to be comfortable.

Alucard witnessed their arrival quite by chance. Still lacking a name for the woman in blue, he could not invoke the magic to focus the distance mirror on her without first locating her within it. Consequentially, he often left the mirror fixed on her for days at a time, particularly after he had first heard wolves calling one another in the night. He possessed compunctions enough to remove himself when courtesy dictated, but he was convinced now that there was nothing the least bit supernatural about his neighbor, and everything from drifters to garden variety accidents might pose a threat to a woman on her own. So, although he had looked in on her from time to time that night, he had not been primarily concerned with her. Instead, he was mulling the construction of a proper fence around parts of the ruined manor and had been preoccupied with a ratty book regarding earthworks and other fortifications.

A sudden movement in the mirror caught his eye, however, and he snapped the book smartly closed, alert and wary. The girl had been fast asleep (the clocktower, miraculously, still functioned as it always had, and it was well after midnight), but now she sat upright in her bed. Her eyes strayed, wide and distant, and her head cocked to one side as she strained to hear over the storm. Some familiar sound reached her, carried over the howling gale, and she threw off her blankets. Her coppery hair glinted madly in the light of the hearth as she pulled a fur about her shoulders, lighted a lantern, and plunged out into the darkness.

Alucard could scarcely see her pitiful light, the rain was so heavy and the darkness so complete. After a minute or two, though, wildly inconstant shadows appeared the walls of a little shed, detached from the main building. In anticipation of the doe’s kidding and the coming winter, the girl had repurposed the shed into a serviceable barn. Her little feet stamped inside, tramping the straw-strewn floor, and she shook off the wet before hanging her lantern. Then she dropped to her knees beside a tremendously pregnant white goat.

A makeshift stall of wooden crates isolated the doe, which lay on its side, heaving, its flanks almost grotesquely distended. Even the most husbandry-ignorant could see its time was imminent. The other two animals poked their heads over the stall, opening and closing their mouths in what Alucard fancied were worried-sounding bleats, but a few minutes’ hurried inspection assured their mistress that all was in order. The girl sat back on her heels, smiling at the nervous animals. Then she rose, and after a brief, reassuring pat on each goat’s head, she huddled under the fur in a corner of the room and laid her head back against the wall – watchful, but not particularly worried. The hour or so that she sat there, curled up in the dim light of the lantern and waiting patiently for the kidding, was the longest that Alucard had ever seen her idle.

She wore a faint smile on her lips as she watched, that peculiar smile only women wear, half arcane knowledge and half dream and spilling over with secrets that men could only grasp at the edges. Just in that moment, the woman in blue had more in common with the dumb, dirty beast grunting in the darkness than with any human man, never mind a half-blood dhampir. They were united in their shared perception of that uniquely female, paradoxical reality in which bloodletting begets life and agony brings ineffable joy. It occurred to him that she might wear that smile for herself, someday, and he was at once chagrinned and embarrassed, as if he had stumbled upon her naked.

He had nearly resolved to leave the mirror, when suddenly the girl cast off her fur and moved closer to the kidding doe, her dreamy expression vanished in alarm. She put a hand on the animal’s belly, and, as Alucard stared, riveted, she thrust the opposite hand inside the goat. Her arm was covered instantly in shit and urine; she wrinkled her nose and kept shoving. After several interminable moments of searching and groping, she found what she had been seeking inside the doe’s womb. Smiling grimly, she began to pull.

She paused every few minutes and grew ruddy with exertion, until eventually, a little pair of black hooves appeared in her hand. It was equal parts fascinating and suspenseful, as the small woman braced her feet against the floor, tugging determinedly at the tiny, wetly gleaming hooves of the stubborn kid.

Something in it recalled his mother at surgery, where as a boy he had been captivated by the fleshy mysteries of the human body, only a bit put off by the uncomfortable thought that there was a good deal of pain involved in his mother’s expert incisions and neat, even stitches.  And yet it was very different, too. Where Lisa Tepes had operated in a sterile, well-lit laboratory, the woman in blue sat on a dirty floor, barely visible in the weak glow of an oil lamp, half-drenched by the torrential rain that glittered in the flashing lightning. The droning rain and rumbling thunder, the indignant bleating of the billy, would have been entirely out of place in his mother's silent operating theater. But the strain and intense concentration evident in the girl's face was not at all unlike his mother’s, when she had excised a painful cyst or maneuvered a dislocated joint back into place.

The moment the kid slid free, in a slurry of blood and water that steamed in the cold air, the girl dragged the fawn-colored baby into her lap, disregarding the mess in which it was covered. She cradled it against her body as she worked vigorously to dry it off with a threadbare blanket. Alucard knew nothing about goats, but he did recall from his father’s science lessons that many mammals avoided winter breeding. Although it was well above freezing outside, as the liquid precipitation attested, the baby goat would become chilled very quickly, as small and wet as it was.

A second kid, white like its mother, followed within a moment or two of the first. It emerged with considerably more ease, now that the way had been paved for it. The girl cleaned and dried it, too, before she tied off and severed its umbilical cord. Weary but pleased, she retreated from the stall, leaving the kids with their mother to nurse. She watched the little goats for a few minutes, resting her arms on the crates, smiling and marveling at their tiny lives. Alucard felt no less fascinated. He knew the hot, sharp tang of blood well, but he found himself wondering what the storeroom smelled like, suffused with the wet, warm fragrance of new life, comingled with petrichor and damp hay and oil-smoke.

The girl was too tired to stay for long, and, after a congratulatory scratch of the nanny’s neck, she took herself and a bucket of rainwater inside, to wash and to sleep. She shed her filthy nightgown so quickly when she got inside that Alucard caught an inadvertent glimpse of one rosy pink nipple before forcing himself to look away. He did not watch as she bathed, although he couldn’t deny a mounting urge to do so.

He did watch her sleep for a time. Weary, she had stumbled to her bed and fallen asleep at once, with her freshly washed hair spreading a dark water mark on her blankets. She slept the slumber of the blameless, motionless and quiet, her brow clear and her pink lips slack and slightly parted. Her hands lay open beside her, red and chapped with cold and wind and work, but easy. If she slept with a knife under her pillow, as Sypha claimed to do, she would never reach it in time if she needed it. Alucard doubted she kept any sort of weapon to hand, though. She probably wouldn’t know what to do with it.

“Who are you?” he asked softly, bemused and enchanted by her sweet sleep, empty of the memories and horrors that plagued his own.

But she slept on, peacefully unawares, unable to hear or answer.

His own sleep was twice disturbed, and although the dreams that wakened him were decidedly more pleasant than his usual nightmares, they were no more restful. For all the following day, he felt wet, ropy locks of auburn hair tangled in his fingers, like the ghosts of amputated limbs. On his throat, over his carotid artery, an imaginary kiss burned in the shape of the girl’s mysterious smile. And _that_ unsettling feeling lingered even longer.

 

* * *

 

The autumn storm passed quickly, and the charcoal grey tumult gave way to a crisp, fresh morning and vividly blue skies. For several days, the earth was saturated with water, the soil darkened to a rich black blackness that promised fecundity and abundance, once the winter had passed. Rainwater filled little dips and crevices in the ground, rippling in the wind, each crest glossy and gleaming in the sunshine. That day, and for two weeks after that, the weather was fine and sunny, chill in the mornings but pleasant in the afternoons.

Even so, winter’s warning had been given, and Alucard took it to heart.

He spent most of a week collecting and trimming a supply of logs with which to fashion a rough palisade to enclose the wing of the manor she inhabited. He bound the logs side-by-side in groups of eight to ten, using rope he had dredged up from the castle’s storerooms, and he worked on the far side of the castle, where his companion was unlikely to stumble across him by accident. When he had some forty yards of fencing constructed, he was stymied by the logistics of raising the palisade without being seen.

Brute strength could only assist him so far. It would take time to dig out a trench deep enough to secure the fencing, it would time to transport the individual sections from the place where they were concealed, and it would take time to lash them to one another once they were sunken in the earth. He might be nimble enough to do it without waking her as she slept, but he couldn’t possibly accomplish the task in a single night. If she saw him or waited up for him, she might try to speak with him, thereby undermining the precarious equilibrium he seemed to have attained.

After a day’s hesitation, he decided that he would simply retreat if she approached, like a feral cat or dog. Eventually she would understand that he wasn’t inclined to further their curious partnership. He worked through the night, slower than he might have, careful to make as little noise as possible.

The next morning, she stared thoughtfully at the few sections of fence he had managed to raise in the night. After milking the goat and tending to the rabbit skins she had on the tanning racks, she went into the castle, carrying a linen satchel with her. Once she had righted books on their shelves and beat the rugs of the small sitting room she had been organizing, she took a seat in a chair by a sunny window, one which faced away from the Belmont grounds. Then she reached into her satchel, where she had packed some of Adrien’s old clothes, took a small knife from a pocket of her cleaning smock, and began to open the seams on a pair of brown leather breeches.

She remained in the castle until sundown, sewing quietly. On the next day, when she resumed her chair by the window and took out her needle and thread, Alucard realized she had intuited his desire to work without chancing confrontation, and he returned to the fence. He managed to raise half of it before the sun’s descent brought her home.

Another two day’s work saw the completion of the wooden palisade, as well as the transformation of two pairs of Adrien’s old sparring leathers. The breeches were not, perhaps, altogether seemly for a woman, but paired with some of his thick woolen stockings, they were decidedly warmer than the tattered grey frock she had been wearing. While she wore his leathers to good effect, Alucard decided privately that he preferred her dresses.  She had a nice figure, and the idea of Trevor Belmont or any other swine eying her little bottom in the snug brown breeches troubled him – mostly because he was an incorrigible ass for doing it himself, and he felt guilty about it.

Guilt didn’t generally cause him to grit his teeth or clench his fists, but he chose not to dwell on the fact. This life was simple and, for the moment, unexpectedly and undeservedly tolerable. Anger was a complicated sort of feeling that suggested other complicated feelings, and so he dutifully chided himself for admiring his silent companion. He didn’t stop looking, though, and he didn’t stop scowling whenever he imagined Belmont returning to look in on his family library. And so they continued, making what winter preparations were possible as the weather turned colder, carefully avoiding one another as they went about their work.

He laid by more firewood, and he began to check the trap line and the fishing lines in addition to his usual hunting, so that she was not obliged to be out of doors more than necessary. Every few nights, he prowled the edges of the woods as a wolf, sniffing for the telltale odors of other predators, warning them away with his own not-quite accurate animal scent. And he continued to mull over the feasibility of a hothouse, discarding one idea after another as impracticable.

He also continued to debate with himself about hunting bigger game, bringing back the venison and pork he had so far avoided. It might soon be cold enough to simply freeze the unused meat in the snow, but while he knew some tenant farmers relied on such risky methods, he preferred not to risk poisoning either himself or his silent companion on spoiled meat. Perhaps if he were to devise a large smoker – god knew how, perhaps there was something instructive in the library – it wouldn’t be too onerous a chore for her to make use of it. If he meant to provide her with one, however, he needed to do it soon, while the deer and boar were still out and about, still fat on autumn’s bounty.

For her part, the woman in his old brown breeches continued to alter Adrien’s old clothing, tapering it to her small, neat frame, to look after her goats, and to tidy the castle. And although there was less game and more smoked fish now that the season had moved on, she continued to cook for him every day, without ever seeming to entertain the slightest curiosity about the person who subsisted entirely on her open-handedness.

Alucard often wondered at her apparent ease with his invisibility and remoteness. It must be a bit like living with a temperamental, peculiarly helpful ghost. There was a puzzled half-smile that came to her face when he did something unexpected, as if she was trying to reconcile it with the impression that she had formed of him, so he didn’t believe she was simply disinterested or incurious. Nor was she afraid – and that was no less strange now than it had been the first day she’d stepped over the threshold. Perhaps it was even more bizarre. By now, she must have realized he watched her, unseen, from time to time. Yet she never seemed uneasy or anxious about being spied upon, and she never tried to retaliate.

In fact, volunteering to remain in the castle while he erected the fence had been, thus far, her most explicit acknowledgment of his desire for solitude. It was an affirmation that she had consciously and deliberately chosen not to violate the distance between them, and a reassurance that she would continue to respect it.

Whatever her private surmises regarding him, and whatever her motivations, Alucard was as profoundly grateful for her delicacy and restraint. She had perceived and honored his wish to be left alone without question or resentment. It was a kindness most people would not have offered him. Few would have understood it to be a kindness at all.

 

* * *

  

Three days after the palisade was erected, Alucard awoke to find that the woman in blue had left both his breakfast and a cold supper on the landing. He kept much later hours than she did, often returning to the castle only an hour or two before she would rise to milk the goat and to make breakfast. A month had come and gone since her soft footfall last roused him; it had become a familiar and comfortable sound, as innocuous as rain or crickets or birdsong, and he no longer reacted to it. If she woke him at all, it was after she began to clean, and then only if she happened to be particularly noisy.

After a glance around the narthex to confirm that she wasn’t nearby, he leaped down from the rafters and retrieved the covered dishes. Ordinarily he could hear her at work and was able to avoid her. Today he heard nothing, so he took his breakfast to the room where he had hidden the distance mirror, to be sure of her location before making his own plans for the day. He focused the mirror on the little yard he had enclosed, scowling to himself upon noticing one section of the fence that was not quite flush with its neighbors, but he didn’t see her there. Nor was she in the little barn, where she occasionally lingered to play with the baby goats.

His stomach began to knot painfully, and the hearty brown bread she baked every few days turned suddenly sour. He set it aside to fuss with the mirror more attentively. He veered its view swiftly down the dank, dark corridors of the tumbled-down Belmont estate and though every room she had visited in the castle, until he was at last persuaded that she was nowhere indoors. Then he reoriented the scrying glass toward the blasted trees, thinking perhaps she had wanted to forage a bit more before the winter really set in.

His search continued without success, and the knot in his stomach grew thorns that pierced him from gut to throat, stifling his breath. There were dangers in the castle that he hadn’t bothered to secure, because she had ventured nowhere near them, but there were dangers outside, too. The river Olt was swift and icy with melted snow from the mountains; she might have gone to check the trout lines and fallen in. The bears had not yet retreated to their winter dens, and wolves prowled all through the year.

Alucard exhaled sharply, willing himself to be calm. She had left him a second meal, he reminded himself. She expected not to return until evening, at least. Probably she was not injured, then. But where would she have gone?

The village? Sfântu Gheorghe was some ten miles upriver.

The thorns in his belly retracted slightly. Ten miles was a long journey for a woman on foot, but by no means extraordinary. Perhaps she had need of more supplies, sewing oddments or honey or some other necessity she could not produce on her own.

Though travel had its hazards, as well. Aside from the hungry animals that would be drawn to any edible refuse left behind by travelers, bandits and opportunistic vagrants haunted the remote paths that served as roads. A pretty young woman, unprotected and alone, would present such lowlifes an irresistible target.

Damnation. If she had gone to the village, he would never locate her with the mirror. There was simply too much ground to cover.

Alucard guided the mirror along the riverbanks anyhow, breakfast forgotten, on the supposition that she would choose to follow it upstream to Sfântu Gheorghe. If that had been her path – or her destination, for that matter – she eluded him. 

Instead, the mirror’s reflections seemed almost calculated to inspire dread.

At one shallow, slow-moving bend, he spied a solitary brown bear sweeping its paw through the water in pursuit of fish. He was an enormous fucker, with two hairless rents in his shaggy hide. These were chillingly vicious and wholly healed scars, just the length of a good axe blade. Alucard could not help speculating that the miserable woodsman that left them there probably had not survived the encounter so well as the bear. At another juncture, a pair of vultures ripped and snapped with urgent hunger at some dead beast, too drenched in gore to be recognizable. And in a little grove of grey alder trees, he saw a hog, an ugly brown sow, industriously eating its own farrow of piglets.

Alucard deactivated the mirror with an oath and flung himself into his chair.

Spying his reflection in the now ordinary looking glass, he unclenched his jaw with an effort, unnerved by the grim and fearful visage he saw there. Exhaling explosively, he pushed himself to his feet. Rumination would only lead to ruin; he required activity.

Hogs did sometimes eat their own young. That was common knowledge. But today, that morsel of naturalist’s trivia was totally unpalatable.

If he happened to catch the girl’s scent on the wind as he hunted, so much the better. Shifted in the form of a wolf, he might well be able to track her. If not, he would return and begin building the damned smoker he had been dithering over for so long. They could use it to preserve the bloody brown cannibal he’d seen in the alder grove.

When he returned to the castle with the hog – whose hateful throat he had ripped out and whose stomach he had removed and cast into the river, whole and unbroken – he went to look out tools with which to butcher it. In the course of avoiding his mother’s kitchen, he happened on something even more distasteful than porcine filicide.

A devil’s forge would not have a pleasant discovery, even while Dracula’s mechanics or magic had been in effect, chilling the room to preserve its stockpiles of supplies. With its master dead and the castle’s inner workings mangled, nature had taken its course with the raw materials that had been left to the Forgemasters after the final battle, and even Alucard’s normally iron stomach turned at the stench of thirty-odd putrefying human corpses. He left the sow in the pillaged wine cellar and then took a torch to everything in the grisly room, resolving to inspect at least the most accessible parts of the castle for other nasty surprises before the woman in blue should chance upon them.

Assuming she returned at all.

He squelched that thought and resolutely turned his mind to the problem of a crafting a smoker. The basic idea was uncomplicated, but he had no experience and no real concept of how to properly gauge the temperature of a fire meant to smoke large cuts of meat. Dracula’s far-ranging literary resources had proved disappointing on the matter; the preservation of flesh for consumption was hardly a vampiric concern. But as he was leaving the devil’s forge, his eyes fell on a grate that had been used to drain blood away from the anvil-alter. It occurred to him that he could leave the temperature entirely in the girl’s hands, if he provided her a way to manipulate it. A grate – a sliding grate – something with a handle that wouldn’t burn her fingers… Alucard nodded to himself and went in search of something to use for a grille that might feasibly vent heat and smoke. Preferably something that had never been drenched in human viscera.

By mid-afternoon, Alucard had butchered the sow and left the meat in satchels hanging on the broken gate, where he usually delivered his kills. He had a practicable idea for a smoker and most of the materials he would require to build it; he would have it fully constructed by the time the meat had cured. Afterward, he might have sniffed out mushrooms, or chopped firewood, or corrected the crooked section of the fence, but he chose not to, unwilling to risk an encounter for which he was not prepared, should she arrive while he was out.

Or so he told himself. But as the day pressed onward, and the girl did not return, the thorns snarled and scratched in his belly, and he could no longer distract himself with menial labor. He was instead perched on the sill of one of the castle’s upper windows, watching the overgrown, tree-littered approach to the Belmont estate, anxious and idle, when a blue-clad figure appeared on the horizon.

He retreated inside at once, heart pounding with a relief that was nearly crippling in its intensity. Like a drowning man hauled unexpectedly from the ocean, his breath came in ragged, grateful gasps and his legs seemed unwilling to support him. The reaction unnerved him, suggesting, as it did, that he had been as anxious on his own behalf as on hers. He shoved the thought aside, unwilling to consider the implications, even as he turned back to the window to reassure himself she was really there.

She was closer now, and while the limits of human vision would detect no more than a blur in the distance, Alucard’s sharper eyes perceived that she moved sluggishly and limped badly, favoring her right foot. A sack that might have been as much as half her own slight weight had been slung over her shoulders, with telltale powder clinging to the roughly stitched seams. In her arms, she cradled a large, paper-wrapped parcel. As he had suspected, she must have walked to town to procure more supplies. When at last she reached the palisade, she fumbled her way through the gate and laid the flour and her paper parcel down beside it. Then she sank to her knees and curled up in a weary heap against the pickets.

A moment later, her expression became suddenly pained. She looked as if she might weep. Rolling her head toward the goat shed, she listened for a moment. Her lips pursed, trembling in a long, shaky exhalation. She resigned herself; her face cleared, and she rose awkwardly to her feet, gripping the gatepost for support. Then she hefted the sack and carried it inside, pausing at the broken remnants of the Belmont’s old stone gate to note the bags of hog-flesh, first with a look of dismay, then with another deep breath and a resolute nod. And she went to work.

The goat was milked, the flour and milk pail and meat carried inside, and water drawn from the well before she finally sat down, wincing as she eased into a chair at the worktable which dominated her little kitchen. She dipped a large cup into the still-warm milk and took a long pull of it, before peeling off her shoes and raising her skirt to inspect the damage to her leg. The knee was badly bruised and swollen, but he didn’t think she could have broken a bone or torn a ligament, or she wouldn’t have been walking at all. Even so, it looked painful.

She looked at it regretfully, sipping at the goat milk. Then she limped to a cupboard to retrieve a long length of cloth with which to wrap the bruised knee. When it was bound, a chore she accomplished with surprising skill and efficiency, she filled a wineskin with cold well water and balanced it carefully on top of the bandage. As Alucard watched with mounting disbelief, she shifted her leg to rest her heel on the bench across from her, grimacing with discomfort.

Most folk remedies for sprains and bruises involved bizarre, unsanitary, and largely ineffectual salves, but she had not relied on any of them. Instead, she had done precisely as his mother would have. Cooling, compressing, and elevating the injury would help reduce inflammation and swelling.

The girl rested her head in her hands for a long, weary moment before turning to business of butchering and salting the pork. Before she began, she rinsed her hands with what remained of the well water – a personal proclivity Alucard had witnessed several times. Until now, though, he had never assigned any significance to her unusual standards of cleanliness and personal hygiene.

“Who are you?” he demanded of the mirror.

Her face was drawn with fatigue and pain, but she worked doggedly to begin the process of curing the meat Alucard had brought her. She sliced his large, rough cuts of pork into long strips before salting them, packing the salt heavily around the bones. Her hands were soon caked with blood and salt, as was her worktable, so much so that when the knife slipped, biting into the thenar eminence – the fleshy base of her thumb – he only realized she had cut herself because of her reaction.

She leaped up from the table, heedless of her injured leg. A terrible grimace stretched across her mouth as tears of pain spilled over her cheeks. On a shelf laden with crockery, she fumbled urgently for the cork of a half-used bottle of sherry. Unable to pull it free with her left hand – her right was dripping blood on the floor – she wrenched it free with her teeth before pouring the remainder of the bottle over her salt-encrusted, blood-stained palm.

Convulsions racked her as she poured; and though of course Alucard could hear nothing, her mouth was open in a shriek of pain. Between the salt and the alcohol, it must have felt as though her hand was on fire.

Alucard’s breath came with nearly the same reluctance as did hers. Where in the bloody hell had she learned to sanitize a wound with alcohol? It fucking _hurt_ , and it wasn’t common knowledge. The Greeks had known of its cleansing properties, but that wisdom had been lost for ages – to most. The immortal phenom Dracula had known of it, though, and he had shared that knowledge with his wife and son.

Alucard gripped the mirror in both hands.

“Who are you?” he shouted. His breath misted on the glass, and there was no answer.

A sudden, terrible sense of dread sucked away his breath. As the girl sank to the ground, head bent, clutching her hand and sobbing, he relinquished his grip on the mirror and backed away, feeling badly off-kilter.

He would know soon enough, he realized dazedly. She might possess fortitude enough to bear up under tonight’s trials, but calamity would strike in time. It always did. A mishap – a predator – an outlaw – and because no amount of grit would preserve her, he would.

Seneca once observed that true friendship was to understand, and to be understood. Alucard remained entirely in the dark regarding the girl’s impetuses, but she had apprehended his needs more deeply and intimately than he himself had done – and she had met them, to the best of her ability. She had been a true friend, and if she called for him, he would go and be damned for it.

Even now, his body was braced for action, wanting only a cry for help to leap down from the castle windows, fly to her rescue, and shatter the idyll.

As the minutes ticked by in the clocktower, the sobbing that had racked her shoulders gave way to less violent weeping, and at length she rose and limped outside. Drawing up well water was difficult, one-handed, but she managed, shivering all the while with cold or pain. Her lean hips rested against the lip of well as she cleansed her bloody hands with the frigid water, taking the strain off her knee for a brief moment. Her lacerated hand continued to drip with blood as she returned to the manor, carrying another bucket of water to boil on the hearth. Before she wrapped it – an awkward task, as she had injured her dominant right hand – she fussed with a crock and dipped out a dollop of honey to coat the wound.

The antiseptic, viscous fluid thus applied, and a strip of clean linen tied off around the base of her thumb, she lifted her injured leg once more to the bench and settled her wineskin of cool water on top of her swollen knee. And, stubbornly, foolishly, she went back to work slicing and salting meat, just as if she hadn’t nearly severed her pollex.

“Jesus,” he swore, shaking his head disbelievingly. He quashed an absurd urge to laugh, undecided as to whether he ought to admire or ridicule her tenacity. “My _mother_ wasn’t so bloody fucking stubborn.”

More enthralled than ever, Alucard focused the mirror tightly on her, struck by every grimace of pain and each slow, sleepy blink of her remarkable eyes. Always meticulous, the girl could not rest until her tasks were complete. She limped wearily through the dim halls to hang the meat in a dark pantry, well away from her little kitchen and the warmth of its glowing hearth. She scrubbed the blood and mess from her table with her one good hand and – very carefully – washed her knives and the salt-filled bowls in which she had dredged the raw pork. When she took the iron pot with its steaming water from the trammel in the hearth and began to slide her bloodstained blue frock from her shoulders, his scruples shrieked at him to look away. His instincts advised differently.

By the time he realized that she was weeping and had draped a curtain over the mirror in red-cheeked shame, she wore nothing but her bandages.


End file.
